Bog Myrtle & Peat

After months of silence, the hill has come within hours of death. The mechanism is depleted – wound down into rust. Smirring waves of rain and raking wind have left little in their wake except the sheep, which now seem yellow and foul against the wracks of snow. Sinister spindrift hisses on the coping stones and the ground is undiggable.

And yet despite this vision of emptiness, the tide has already turned. At some unimaginable distance to the south, a flow of warmth and activity has begun to rise. Soon the wave will flood these spaces and swill them with life, but the first signs come softly and easily overlooked.

There are always a few pipits on the hill. A handful of birds can be found here throughout the winter, but their numbers suddenly double in January. This is no great spectacle, but then the numbers double again. A cold easterly wind sets the count back down, but when it breaks the numbers rise higher still. There is not much in the short and raucous span of a meadow pipit’s life to hold a human’s attention, but their movements are telling.

By May, pipits will be the showboat darlings of spring. Their noisy, bombastic displays fill every corner of the farm, but they return after midwinter like voiceless mice. They only rise under close provocation, and they flush quietly like spots of hail in the wind. The new arrivals huddle quietly together in silence. Perhaps a lark or two will join them, but cold winds make my eyes water and it’s hard to tell the two apart in the sleet – besides, the distinction hardly matters now because small birds provide a pulse.

What better way to begin a year than with a stirring, mysterious influx of birdflesh; the currency; the underpinning tier of the foodchain. Having been absent for weeks, a predator arrives. He turns into the wind and bends his head down to concentrate.

Flying at the height of a human navel, the hen harrier rides quietly over the tall rushes with his yellow mouse-trap feet set on a hair-trigger. It is hard to watch him for long as the cold prowls around and pries itself between the joints in my fingers, but soon he turns his grey shape downwind and begins a new line of enquiry.

At once he vanishes, dropping vertically down into the grass as if his puppet strings have been cut. He holds his black-tipped wings above his head to keep them safe; feathers are fragile and the ground is burred with frozen grass. Harriers are not hardy birds, and  snow in the hills will drive them down to easier pickings on the sea shore where the mild Solway laps mud into the reeds. But this new tide of life is irresistible, and the harriers are borne uphill again on a current of blood and sinew.

Something has died, because he rises up and moves downwind to land again on shorter grass. But that area is not short enough, so he waddles over the moss and finds a spot that is more to his liking; a flash of green and a stump of molehill. Then he stands motionless; an incongruous white speck in this relentless savannah of grass and slush. Fifteen minutes pass before there is movement, then eating begins.

Despite a live wire of savagery, these birds are well accustomed to being small and vulnerable in the face of stronger teeth and claws. Perhaps he fears a rushing charge from a hungry fox, or the sudden, bone-rending impact of a goshawk’s ambush. Life is not simply a matter of hunting.

Small shreds of feather and flesh blow downwind and are frozen before they settle. There are scraps of spring in the air.